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“Who else will you marry?”
“I don’t know. Maybe no one. I want to at least go away to school before I think about marriage.”
Cettina only laughed because all the girls we knew, even the ugly ones, got married at sixteen or seventeen. I knew Gio wouldn’t be a terrible husband for me. He was kind and gentle. Cettina was already engaged to his best friend. We could continue through life as a foursome. But a baby with Gio would tether me to this village on top of the mountain forever. Like my mother and her mother before her, I would probably never leave it.
La strega hardly blinked through my story, her expression remained unchanged, as if she’d already heard it and I was merely confirming the details. Her hands fluttered in her lap, and her eyes rolled back in her head, which made her look like she was dying. My limbs stiffened and I reached for Cettina. The woman looked down and moved her lips slightly, twitching each of her fingers as if she was counting on them. Then she placed a hand on the lower half of my abdomen, cupping the tiny curve, just nearly visible beneath my dress. Her warm palm pressed against me as the sunlight shifted to cast her in a jaundiced glow. We sat like that for a minute and then a minute more.
When she spoke her voice was sad but resigned.
“My medicine will not work. It is too late for you.”
THREE
SARA
Viewed from above, the shapely boot of Italy appears to be kicking the island of Sicily into the tumultuous crease between the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian Seas. The color of the water beneath us shifted and swirled from light blue to navy to an emerald green. Our plane nearly grazed the severe cliffs lining the shore as we swooped above the burnt-orange rooftops of Palermo.
It was gorgeous and otherworldly and still I thought, for maybe the hundredth time since I took off from Philadelphia, What the hell am I doing?
“It’s an adventure, baby girl.” I heard Rosie so clearly that my eyes watered. The fact that I didn’t make this trip with her when she was alive weighed me down and yet it still felt like she was right there with me.
A painfully young and striking Italian flight attendant made me put the box with Rosie’s ashes in it in the overhead compartment before we landed. Until then I’d had it in my lap. I imagined it warming my thighs even though that was impossible. It was just a box.
Rosie’s last voice memo to me on the day before she died played on repeat in my mind.
Buck up. Get your ass out of bed and seize the goddamn day.
I hoped that she had managed to seize her last goddamn day.
“Do you think she was losing it?” Carla asked when I told her about what Aunt Rosie wanted me to do here in Sicily, about the all-expenses-paid trip, about the deed for land that might or might not be worth anything. “Did she have dementia at the end that we didn’t know about?”
“She was sharp as a knife.”
“You sure? Everyone sort of loses it when they’re that old,” Carla said.
“I’m totally sure she hadn’t lost it.”
“I wish I was going with you. I mean it’s not like she bought me a plane ticket or anything, but I wish I could have gotten out of work to come, even if I had to pay my own way.”
“I know,” I said. “And Rosie probably knew you had a big case going on, plus the kids.” I lied to assuage my sister’s quiet jealousy. We both knew I was Rosie’s favorite and most of the time it never bothered Carla because she had been everyone else’s favorite for our entire lives. She was bouncy, sparkly, and liquid magic. In addition to everything that made Carla so outwardly lovely, she also made you feel like the most captivating person in the room and that made her the truly captivating one. Things just worked for her while I struggled for everything. I never resented her though; her charm worked on me most of all. Rosie had understood from the very start that I needed one person to love me a little bit more than they loved my sister.
But Carla still felt the need to add, “Also she knew you needed cash. And that getting away would be good for you. This was like her final way of taking care of you. You’ve hardly changed your clothes for the past two weeks.”
“That’s not true.” It was true.
“So do what the letter says. Go to Sicily. Figure out if this deed is real or not. It’s probably not, but whatever,” Carla said. “Have sex with some hunky Italian men who don’t speak a word of English. Eat good food and drink all the wine, eat and pray and love and all that shit, and then come home and put your life back together.”
In that moment we both pretended like food and sex could be the answer to what had broken me instead of therapy, pharmaceuticals, and a time machine. I promised her I would try my best.
The pilot announced something so fast it was impossible for me to understand despite the fact that I’ve managed to retain a decent proficiency from the Italian classes Rosie enrolled me in as a child. She paid for them for all her great-nieces and great-nephews starting in elementary school. It was so important to her that we embrace our heritage. Rosie’s father, Giovanni, spoke only Italian at home and she remained fluent until the day she died. All my cousins dropped out after a year. I was the only one who kept it up, spending Saturday mornings in the smoke-filled basement of Saint Rita’s down by the baseball stadium for more than a decade. Even though Rosie’s Italian was speckled with her father’s Sicilian dialect and mine was more basic, the two of us used it as our secret language to talk shit about everybody else at family gatherings.
On the way to get my bag, I tried to call Jack to say good morning to Sophie, completely forgetting the time difference and getting his voicemail. I recorded a quick video message for my daughter instead, making funny faces and pantomiming eating a lot of pizza, her favorite food.
I’d never been truly away from my daughter for a long period of time. Since I’d moved out of our house six months ago, I’d been busting my ass to keep the restaurant alive. We began offering delivery service for the first time. Came up with a scheme to curate customized meat boxes every month. We stayed open for more hours. None of it was enough to make payroll and rent and health insurance. But I still made it over to the house every morning to take Soph to day care. Then I picked her up most days and brought her to the restaurant while I prepped the dinner service. I tried to give everything to both my babies, Sophie and La Macellaia, but I was running on empty all the time and it wasn’t enough for either of them.
I had thought Jack and I were still figuring the arrangements out, figuring us out. I didn’t expect him to hire a lawyer to officially file for divorce and full-time custody of our daughter, but he did, a month ago. I’d been trying to hire my own legal team to fight back ever since, no easy task when you have no cash or credit for the hefty deposit they all required.
My bag was the last one on the carousel. The second I made it into the arrivals area I ran into a meatball-shaped man hoisting a sign with my name above his head like I was someone who mattered.
